August 30, 2005
Anxious Embed Reporting for Duty
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS
By Chris Ayres
280 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $23.
Imagine George Costanza from "Seinfeld" or one of Woody Allen's hypochondriacal heroes being sent off to cover the Iraq war, and you have a pretty good idea of what Chris Ayres's hilarious new memoir is like.
In "War Reporting for Cowards," Mr. Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, recounts how he went from being the paper's Hollywood correspondent, used to interviewing stars and starlets, to being embedded with a group of marines who called themselves "the Long Distance Death Dealers" as they helped spearhead the American invasion of Iraq. The book he has written reads as though Larry David had rewritten "MASH" and Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the peculiar experience of being an embedded reporter.
By his own account, Mr. Ayres is a thoroughly unlikely war correspondent. At 27, he's a full-blown hypochondriac, constantly imagining that he's suffering from diabetes or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or premature Alzheimer's. He suffers from panic attacks, a queasy stomach and lingering bouts of anxiety and dread.
Mr. Ayres says he always looked upon war reporters as "a different species: fearless and sun-tanned outdoors types who became Boy Scout leaders at school, studied Latin and Urdu at Oxford and probably knew the correct way to eat a sheep's penis at the table of an African warlord." Looking at their careers, he says he felt "a mixture of envy and bafflement"; after all, he became a reporter himself, he says, because he "wanted to meet celebrities, dine at Michelin-starred restaurants and feel important at parties."
So why did Mr. Ayres trade his cushy post in Los Angeles - where he dreamed of drinking cappuccinos at Shutters and cruising Sunset Strip in his Jeep - for a seat in a Humvee in the mine-laden marshlands of Iraq? He claims it was cowardice that led him to accept the assignment. Half asleep and hung over from the night before, he'd blurted out an automatic "Love to!" when his editor in London phoned to ask him if he wanted to go to war.
"Respond in the positive, my brain remembered. Be enthusiastic. Foreign correspondents are supposed to love wars, after all. What kind of journalist would prefer to lie by the pool in West Hollywood, drinking cappuccinos from Urth Café and writing about post-Oscars parties with Donald Trump and Elton John?"
By the time that Mr. Ayres realized his editor was serious and that he was being sent to the front lines, it was too late, he says, to back out without losing face. He felt woefully unprepared. His only references for war were movies like "Saving Private Ryan," "Three Kings" and "Apocalypse Now,"and he was equally unprepared for the physical rigors of war coverage. A general describes his coming ordeal as "the worst camping trip of your life," and Mr. Ayres thinks, he wasn't only a "war virgin" but a "camping virgin" as well: he had never "slept rough or toasted a marshmallow over an open fire" and had never wanted to.
Mr. Ayres starts worrying about being shot, kidnapped or beheaded. He worries about Gulf War Syndrome. He worries about anthrax and smallpox vaccinations. He worries about his ability to don a gas mask. He worries about landmines and scorpions and spiders. The "Surviving Dangerous Countries" course he takes gives him even more things to worry about: he and the other reporters enrolled in the course are advised "to carry a Ziploc bag in our backpacks, for severed fingers or toes."
In an effort to fill a things-to-buy list sent to him by the Marines, Mr. Ayres goes to a trendy mountaineering shop on Sunset Boulevard and ends up buying a bright yellow two-man tent emblazoned with a fluorescent red cross on top - a purchase, he later realizes, that will make him a perfect, Day-Glo target. Along with more than $5,000 worth of recommended gear, he also packs his electric toothbrush, his badger-hair shaving brush, rolls of double-quilted toilet paper, dozens of tubes of sun block, three different types of floppy sunhats, the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East, a dozen canisters of nerve gas antidote and 20 times the recommended number of boxer shorts - so much stuff that he needs to buy a metal traveling dolly to get it all to the airport.
In country, things live up to many of Mr. Ayres's worst expectations. The Marine unit he's attached to traverses perilous mine-laden wastelands, gets lost in a mud storm and is faced with an assault by Iraqi tanks.
Although Mr. Ayres leaves the front lines after only nine days - the title of the book, the reader is reminded, is "War Reporting for Cowards" - he gives us some indelible snapshots of the war. He captures that gruesome elixir of boredom and fear that permeates a military campaign, and he conveys the anomalous situation of embedded reporters.
Having his own fate so intimately wedded to that of the soldiers he's covering, Mr. Ayres says, turned him into a kind of a gung-ho marine, though he simultaneously realized that he had no idea of the actual progress of the war. "My mum knew more about the war more than I did," he writes. "Sometimes I felt as though all I could do was stand next to the guns and describe how loud they were. Was that worth dying for?"
And so, when his satellite phone is confiscated by the military, Mr. Ayres takes the opportunity to leave the Long Death Dealers and go home. He notes that his combat experience had at least one positive consequence: it cured him of his panic attacks and free-floating anxiety.
"I no longer dread the dirty bomb on the Underground; the nuke in Times Square; the anthrax in the post," he writes. "Battlefield fear has put all other fear into perspective. Perhaps that's what my generation needs: urgent, mortal terror. I sang in the shower this morning because the water was hot and because no one was trying to kill me. It was a pure, uncomplicated happiness. I can only hope this lasts." Needless to say, it's a luxury still unavailable to many of the soldiers Mr. Ayres and other reporters covered.
http://
Anxious Embed Reporting for Duty
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS
By Chris Ayres
280 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $23.
Imagine George Costanza from "Seinfeld" or one of Woody Allen's hypochondriacal heroes being sent off to cover the Iraq war, and you have a pretty good idea of what Chris Ayres's hilarious new memoir is like.
In "War Reporting for Cowards," Mr. Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, recounts how he went from being the paper's Hollywood correspondent, used to interviewing stars and starlets, to being embedded with a group of marines who called themselves "the Long Distance Death Dealers" as they helped spearhead the American invasion of Iraq. The book he has written reads as though Larry David had rewritten "MASH" and Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the peculiar experience of being an embedded reporter.
By his own account, Mr. Ayres is a thoroughly unlikely war correspondent. At 27, he's a full-blown hypochondriac, constantly imagining that he's suffering from diabetes or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or premature Alzheimer's. He suffers from panic attacks, a queasy stomach and lingering bouts of anxiety and dread.
Mr. Ayres says he always looked upon war reporters as "a different species: fearless and sun-tanned outdoors types who became Boy Scout leaders at school, studied Latin and Urdu at Oxford and probably knew the correct way to eat a sheep's penis at the table of an African warlord." Looking at their careers, he says he felt "a mixture of envy and bafflement"; after all, he became a reporter himself, he says, because he "wanted to meet celebrities, dine at Michelin-starred restaurants and feel important at parties."
So why did Mr. Ayres trade his cushy post in Los Angeles - where he dreamed of drinking cappuccinos at Shutters and cruising Sunset Strip in his Jeep - for a seat in a Humvee in the mine-laden marshlands of Iraq? He claims it was cowardice that led him to accept the assignment. Half asleep and hung over from the night before, he'd blurted out an automatic "Love to!" when his editor in London phoned to ask him if he wanted to go to war.
"Respond in the positive, my brain remembered. Be enthusiastic. Foreign correspondents are supposed to love wars, after all. What kind of journalist would prefer to lie by the pool in West Hollywood, drinking cappuccinos from Urth Café and writing about post-Oscars parties with Donald Trump and Elton John?"
By the time that Mr. Ayres realized his editor was serious and that he was being sent to the front lines, it was too late, he says, to back out without losing face. He felt woefully unprepared. His only references for war were movies like "Saving Private Ryan," "Three Kings" and "Apocalypse Now,"and he was equally unprepared for the physical rigors of war coverage. A general describes his coming ordeal as "the worst camping trip of your life," and Mr. Ayres thinks, he wasn't only a "war virgin" but a "camping virgin" as well: he had never "slept rough or toasted a marshmallow over an open fire" and had never wanted to.
Mr. Ayres starts worrying about being shot, kidnapped or beheaded. He worries about Gulf War Syndrome. He worries about anthrax and smallpox vaccinations. He worries about his ability to don a gas mask. He worries about landmines and scorpions and spiders. The "Surviving Dangerous Countries" course he takes gives him even more things to worry about: he and the other reporters enrolled in the course are advised "to carry a Ziploc bag in our backpacks, for severed fingers or toes."
In an effort to fill a things-to-buy list sent to him by the Marines, Mr. Ayres goes to a trendy mountaineering shop on Sunset Boulevard and ends up buying a bright yellow two-man tent emblazoned with a fluorescent red cross on top - a purchase, he later realizes, that will make him a perfect, Day-Glo target. Along with more than $5,000 worth of recommended gear, he also packs his electric toothbrush, his badger-hair shaving brush, rolls of double-quilted toilet paper, dozens of tubes of sun block, three different types of floppy sunhats, the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East, a dozen canisters of nerve gas antidote and 20 times the recommended number of boxer shorts - so much stuff that he needs to buy a metal traveling dolly to get it all to the airport.
In country, things live up to many of Mr. Ayres's worst expectations. The Marine unit he's attached to traverses perilous mine-laden wastelands, gets lost in a mud storm and is faced with an assault by Iraqi tanks.
Although Mr. Ayres leaves the front lines after only nine days - the title of the book, the reader is reminded, is "War Reporting for Cowards" - he gives us some indelible snapshots of the war. He captures that gruesome elixir of boredom and fear that permeates a military campaign, and he conveys the anomalous situation of embedded reporters.
Having his own fate so intimately wedded to that of the soldiers he's covering, Mr. Ayres says, turned him into a kind of a gung-ho marine, though he simultaneously realized that he had no idea of the actual progress of the war. "My mum knew more about the war more than I did," he writes. "Sometimes I felt as though all I could do was stand next to the guns and describe how loud they were. Was that worth dying for?"
And so, when his satellite phone is confiscated by the military, Mr. Ayres takes the opportunity to leave the Long Death Dealers and go home. He notes that his combat experience had at least one positive consequence: it cured him of his panic attacks and free-floating anxiety.
"I no longer dread the dirty bomb on the Underground; the nuke in Times Square; the anthrax in the post," he writes. "Battlefield fear has put all other fear into perspective. Perhaps that's what my generation needs: urgent, mortal terror. I sang in the shower this morning because the water was hot and because no one was trying to kill me. It was a pure, uncomplicated happiness. I can only hope this lasts." Needless to say, it's a luxury still unavailable to many of the soldiers Mr. Ayres and other reporters covered.
http://
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コメント(1)
この書評は読みながら声を出して笑ってしまいました。本当に面白い。
本文中からの引用が中心の批評なのですが、Kakutaniさんの引用の仕方が実に上手いんですよね。あまりにも上手いので、この本を読むのが怖くなります。本編より宣伝の方が面白い映画みたいだったらいやだなと…。
著者はThe Times of Londonのハリウッドリポーター。セレブリティに会ったり、カフェでカプチーノを飲んだりWest Hollywoodのプールで寝そべるのが好きでこの仕事についた（しかも憂鬱症でいつも自分が何か重病に侵されているのではないかと怯えている）のですが、ある日ひょんなことからイラク戦争の前線記者として借り出されることになってしまったから大変です。タイトル通り臆病者で、戦争どころかキャンプすら経験したことのないインドア派のWoody Allen's hypochondriacal heroesタイプの記者が、一体前線で生き延びることができるのか…？
ーー具体的な内容は書評に任せますーー
ともかく、彼はたったの9日で撤収できることになり、無事にハリウッドに戻って来ます。朝シャワーを浴びながら幸福だと感じるのです。なぜならシャワーが暖かく、誰も彼を殺そうとはしないから…。
It was a pure, uncomplicated happiness.
こんなオチでいいのだろうか。
ただ、臆病者の観察眼は勇者のそれより優れていると思うので…この本もalternativeなイラク戦争記を提供してくれているのではないかと期待。
本文中からの引用が中心の批評なのですが、Kakutaniさんの引用の仕方が実に上手いんですよね。あまりにも上手いので、この本を読むのが怖くなります。本編より宣伝の方が面白い映画みたいだったらいやだなと…。
著者はThe Times of Londonのハリウッドリポーター。セレブリティに会ったり、カフェでカプチーノを飲んだりWest Hollywoodのプールで寝そべるのが好きでこの仕事についた（しかも憂鬱症でいつも自分が何か重病に侵されているのではないかと怯えている）のですが、ある日ひょんなことからイラク戦争の前線記者として借り出されることになってしまったから大変です。タイトル通り臆病者で、戦争どころかキャンプすら経験したことのないインドア派のWoody Allen's hypochondriacal heroesタイプの記者が、一体前線で生き延びることができるのか…？
ーー具体的な内容は書評に任せますーー
ともかく、彼はたったの9日で撤収できることになり、無事にハリウッドに戻って来ます。朝シャワーを浴びながら幸福だと感じるのです。なぜならシャワーが暖かく、誰も彼を殺そうとはしないから…。
It was a pure, uncomplicated happiness.
こんなオチでいいのだろうか。
ただ、臆病者の観察眼は勇者のそれより優れていると思うので…この本もalternativeなイラク戦争記を提供してくれているのではないかと期待。
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